A few days ago, I posed the question “how does one track buzz online?” and got only a smattering of replies. I asked this because we’re starting to get more requests from our clients to be able to tap into social media in a meaningful way. At first we helped by creating the requisite feeds for google news and blogsearch, twitter search notifications, technorati and bloglines mentions and aggregating them ourselves via simple RSS tools. But for some clients, this clearly produces a firehose of information. What they need, I think, is a dashboard that helps them deal with copious amounts of information. It needs to be simple, intuitive, cheap and offer incredible amounts of value from minute 1.

We put together a CWTV firehose over at LC in order to track the buzz surround gossip girl. It tracks it alright. Bit by copious bit. That’s great. Now how do I deal with all that information? How do I compare it to the day before? LC was not designed for this task. LC is clearly the wrong tool for this particular job.

Surely there must be better social search tools out there. Surely.

Bettering than the Old School “Gossip Girl” Buzz Meter

The search term we used was “gossip girl” (keeping it simple) and we only invoked google blog search, google news search, technorati, bloglines and twitter search results. As you can see, for such a popular online topic as “gossip girl” there’s a lot of chatter to process. 

I did my research and found some tools that are essentially buzz meters. Some tout themsevles as such. Some toy with the notion that they are social search engines. Some pretend to be one while they are in fact the other. 

Below I’ve compiled a list of the social search engines / buzz meters I was able to find in my two-day search. 

Key:
Y = Yes, I can confirm this feature exists on this site.
N = No, that feature definitely does not exist on this site.
? = I cannot say definitively that the feature does or does not exists on this site.

Clearly I could use some help editing the features spreadsheet. In the coming days I will devote more time to doing so. I will also talk in more detail about the products I like in this category.